A friend recently urged me to watch The Social Dilemma, a documentary on Netflix. It sounded boring — another expose of the perils of social media. Ho hum, old news. But the film gripped me. It’s an in-depth look at how Big Tech companies, by amassing more and more data on us, are getting better and better at manipulating us, with devastating results.
The film has several strands. One dramatizes, with actors, how social media hurt an American family. These scenes were a little hokey. The most compelling, and disturbing, component of the documentary consists of interviews with tech insiders worried about what they have wrought. Actually, “worried” is too bland a word. These veterans of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other companies are freaking out. Some think digital technologies, unregulated, might destroy civilization.
Google et al equip legions of brilliant engineers with vast databases and powerful AI programs to make their products as addictive as possible — that is, to maximize the time we spend staring at a screen. The designers of these devices find them irresistible, too. Tim Kendall, once head of monetization for Facebook, recalls that after spending all day trying to boost his firm’s profits, he went home to his wife and kids and could not stay off his phone. “Knowing what was going on behind the curtain, I still wasn’t able to control my usage.”
The more time we spend on our screens, the more the companies learn about us, the more money they make from advertising, commercial and political, tailored to our fears and desires. And once they deduce what news and (mis)information we like, or might like, online sites feed us more of it, confirming our biases. If you begin a search on, say, climate change, Google may suggest different results depending on what it knows about you and others where you live, according to a former Google designer.
This data-driven pandering not only keeps us glued to our devices. It has also contributed to the proliferation of fake news and conspiracy theories and to social schisms in the U.S. and elsewhere. We end up living in parallel universes with radically different views of global warming, race, gender, immigration, crime, abortion, and COVID-19.
Some techies believed, initially, that they were creating a better world. “Our entire motivation was ‘Can we spread positivity and love in the world?’,” says Justin Rosenstein, who helped design Facebook’s “Like” button. The possibility that “teens would be getting depressed when they don’t have enough Likes, or it could be leading to political polarization, was nowhere on our radar.”
Yes, digital technologies yield vast benefits. During the pandemic I keep in touch with friends and family via email and Zoom, and I teach my classes online. I can do research for this article — re-watching Social Dilemma and looking up reviews on my laptop right here in my apartment. When I tire of brooding over the downside of tech, I can binge on Arrested Development.
Our digital era is a blend of “utopia and dystopia,” says Tristan Harris, who left Google to cofound The Center for Humane Technology (a phrase that sounds increasingly oxymoronic). “I can hit a button on my phone and a car shows up in 30 seconds and I can go exactly where I need to go. That is magic.” But Harris fears tech’s ill effects are outweighing its benefits. “If we don’t agree on truth,” he says, “or even that there is such a thing as truth, we’re toast.”
One pundit insists that newspapers, radio, and television didn’t destroy civilization, and neither will smart phones. Another retorts that smart phones are far more addictive than previous information technologies. When many of us wake up in the morning, he notes, the only question is whether we check our phones before we pee or while we pee. And modern methods of surveillance and persuasion make those employed in the pre-digital era look laughably crude.
Toward the end of the film, Social Dilemma identifies capitalism as the ultimate cause of the ills wrought by Big Tech. Rosenstein, the Facebook designer, notes that capitalism promotes “short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs.” This approach, which views nature as something to be mined, literally and metaphorically, for monetary gain, has given us climate change and other environmental threats.
The successful Big Tech firms have figured out how to mine our attention. “We’re more profitable to a corporation,” Rosenstein says, “if we’re staring at a screen, staring at an ad, then if we’re spending our time living our life in a rich way.” Rosenstein and others say the government must regulate tech firms to limit the harm they do; the companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves.
Shoshana Zuboff, a psychologist at Harvard Business School, contends that companies should not be free to gather and sell information on customers without their consent. “These markets undermine democracy and they undermine freedom, and they should be outlawed,” she says. “This is not a radical proposal. There are other markets that we outlaw. We outlaw markets in human organs. We outlaw markets in human slaves.”
Near the end of Social Dilemma, an interviewer asks tech-visionary-turned-critic Jaron Lanier to peer into our future. “If we go down the current status quo,” Lanier replies, “for let’s say another 20 years, we probably destroy our civilization through willful ignorance. We probably fail to meet the challenge of climate change. We probably degrade the world’s democracies, so they fall into some bizarre autocratic dysfunction. We probably ruin the global economy. We probably”—he shrugs—“don’t survive.” Asked what he fears most, Kendall, the former Facebook executive, replies, “In the shortest time horizon? Civil war.”
Give capitalism its due. As I acknowledge in a recent book, capitalism has boosted longevity and prosperity over the last two centuries. But capitalism has also burdened us with acute inequality, dysfunctional health care, surging climate change and vicious political polarization. Meanwhile we keep robotically swiping our smart phones as things fall apart. I try to resist alarmism, as a general rule, but alarmism feels like realism lately.
John Horgan directs the Stevens Center for Science Writings. This column is adapted from one originally published on ScientificAmerican.com.
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